The rapid influx of new cloud and mobile technologies is straining the capabilities of older IAM solutions. These new technologies make it more difficult for IT staff to manage and control access, ultimately increasing the risk of fraud, data theft and security breaches.

The days of centralized control are a thing of the past. Workers now bring their own mobile devices to the workplace and use them to access corporate applications and data, and business units have more autonomy to buy and deploy cloud applications without consulting or involving the IT organization. That means IT departments must extend their IAM strategies to cover users, devices and applications outside the traditional datacenter.

The right approach to handle all these changes should have a long-term view in mind. IAM must address the immediate, tactical needs facing the organization, but at the same time it must be part of a long-term strategy for business improvement.

This new approach involves four critical components, including:

• Extension of IAM processes and tools to centrally manage data center and cloud environments: Organizations need seamless “cross-domain” governance, provisioning, and access management to securely manage all resources, wherever they are hosted — on-premises or in the cloud. It is inefficient to have separate processes and tools for managing cloud apps, and enterprises need consistent policy enforced and visibility to all resources, no matter where they reside.

• Integration of IAM and mobile device management (MDM) solutions: Today’s workers increasingly use rich mobile apps as the means to access cloud and Web applications. The integration of IAM with MDM enables organizations to gain end-to-end visibility and control across mobile, cloud, and on-premises resources, and realize significant operational efficiencies in how they govern access, enforce policy, and grant, change and remove mobile access.